With continuous economic development, an increasing number of chemicals are released into the environment. There is a wide range of pollutants with complex components, and environmental pollution is often caused by multiple pollutants interacting together. Therefore, chemical analysis methods relying on traditional single-by-discrimination for combined pollution contaminants are difficult to be implemented. Traditional techniques are time and manpower-consuming and may leads to deficient environmental risk assessment. In contrast, new chemical analysis methods such as effect-directed analysis (EDA) combines toxic effects and chemical analysis to effectively identify key toxicants in environmental pollution.
Hormone or endocrine disruptors are compounds that have impacts on endocrine systems of humans and wildlife. Through intake, accumulation and other ways, they play similar roles that natural hormones play in organisms. Even small amounts, they disrupt organisms' endocrine system and cause various anomalies. Therefore, risks of endocrine disruptors in environmental samples deserve attention. At present, researches on endocrine disruptors focus on estrogenic compounds. For androgenic compounds, studies are relatively fewer. Androgenic compounds may interfere at lower concentrations endocrine regulation of normal biological processes and have adverse effects on development and reproductive functions. Currently, a lot of studies have shown that androgenic activity is widely detectable in environmental samples especially in Europe and U. S.
Since a wide variety of contaminants exist in environmental samples, with complex intermediate products and by-products, how to identify main toxic substances in complex environmental samples effectively is extremely important.
It has not been reported that major androgen disruptors may be identified and analyzed by the combination of bioassays, instrumental analysis and toxicity simulation. The proposed disclosure implements androgenic effect-directed identification using solid phase extraction for concentration, preparative chromatography or gel exclusion chromatography sequentially for fractionation, utilizing protective liquid to optimize high throughput fractionation, combining targeted and non-targeted approaches to achieve high resolution mass spectrometry analysis, molecular simulation for toxicant screening, and to enable identification of androgen disruptors in complex environmental samples.